


A/B (O)

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Crack Treated Seriously, Knotting, M/M, Mating Bites, Mating Bond, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Verse, Pining, Post Gauda Prime, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-25 14:17:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Avon had thought, as the clean-filtered air of the Liberator cleared the London’s double-dose of suppressants out of his lungs, and the man he’d reluctantly fallen in love with was suddenly so present that Avon could have located him anywhere on the ship, <i>Oh</i>. Of course. Of-bloody-<i>course</i>. Not ‘a carrier of some kind, probably another Alpha, under these drugs’ after all. He would have to be an Omega, <i>wouldn’t</i> he? A highly political Omega, who Avon’s body started incessantly screaming at him to take irrevocably, and who would want less than nothing to do with him."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. ahahah what can I say? What can I fucking say. I wrote an a/b/o fic for Blake's 7, like, as a weird dare? to myself?? It's not a genre I even read/go in for. No offense if you do, just, it's not my bag and I had to /research this extensively/ to write one. 
> 
> If you do not know what a/b/o is, please proceed to item 3 on this list.
> 
> I thank Wellharkather for her explanations and planning assistance, Elviaprose for first-reading the madness, and Aralias for beta(aha)ing it.
> 
> 2\. Of COURSE we thought of Secret Omega!Avon first. Of course we did. We're not like, new here, we can see a trope coming over the horizon. And I do have some thoughts about that and might write it eventually, but it seemed interesting to try and figure out how the less obvious assumption could go. 
> 
> 3\. The fake-biology in play is from this essay: http://archiveofourown.org/works/4299357 "A/B/O: Adventures in Fake Science." by Hells Bartender (Firebog_Tour_Guide)
> 
> 4\. I've always thought the Doctor Who episode "Ark in Space" (Four era) featured a human society that feels very Blake's 7 to me. All the apocalypse/directed breeding and recolonizing Earth stuff herein is a fusion with that episode--thus, per "Ark", at some earlier point humans had a form of transmatt technology, which they've subsequently lost. 
> 
> 5\. I'm not sorry. And I never will be.

**Chapter 1**

After the solar flares died away, and after the radiation from those flares and the Last War had finally cleared, the Ark returned human life to Earth. The newly-formed Federation’s scientists, liking order and wanting to restore a planetary population in a hurry, had devised a method of hierarchically organized breeding that promised to swell the ranks even as it sorted the wheat from the chaff. In one respect, it was a phenomenal success. Within generations, Earth’s human population had returned to sustainable levels--the breeding problems caused by fallout-related genetic degradation and related sterility thoroughly corrected. However the new breeding system had also resulted in unpleasant, messy, physicality that ran against the grain of the culture the scientists had instilled in the people they’d bred. The system’s hierarchies were found to be inconvenient and imperfect. Thus a Re-grading disposed of these initial Alpha, Beta and Omega categories and organized humans along a theoretically meritocratic system based on intelligence-testing, which followed the alphabet in a more logical progression (though familial connections, economic-class bias and regionalism inevitably undermined its supposed disinterested objectivity).

Geneticists tried to weed out the legacy of the A/B/O period, but the codes had been designed for hardiness in a rough new world, and the scientists tasked with undoing their predecessors’ work met with limited success. Culture also interfered. To be an Alpha in any sense was a status symbol, and powerful families were reluctant to give up their genetic uniqueness. To be an Omega was to occupy a differently privileged and unprivileged category. People resisted passing their children over for gene-therapy for a host of reasons: familial pride, politics, a sense of identification with one’s sex-class, distrust of the government that offered such therapies, the hope that one’s sex-class might lend one safety and power in some respect, and (where applicable) an acknowledgement of the sheer genetic utility of being able to both father and mother children. Abilities and memory were inveigled in the question, and the genes themselves did not go quietly.

By the time Roj Blake, leader of the Freedom Party, was banished from Earth, roughly a quarter of the population of that planet was still in some way A/B/O-carrying (while every soul thereupon was under the sway of the new system, with its confusing overlapping terminology, so obviously predicated on the new grades being the total replacement they had never quite managed to become). Roughly five percent of the total population was Omega.

Roj Blake had a lot of reasons for resisting the government. The fact that, in addition to being classed Alpha under the new system, he was also a part of the five-percent Omega demographic was just one of them, and not a terribly significant one at that.

***

A lot of people initially thought Avon was an Omega. He couldn’t really see why. Vila claimed _he_ could, but Avon didn’t pay a lot of attention to what Vila (a Beta himself--genetically distinct from the new Unmarked model, with a better-developed vomeronasal organ) claimed. The composition of their crew was slightly statistically unlikely, in that it contained two Alphas (himself and Jenna), Vila (whose whole family had evidently proved as resistant to gene-therapy as he himself was to reconditioning), and of course--Blake.

Gan’s colony had formed before the experiments had taken place, and so he was wholly unmarked. Human, original flavor--not even the reboot edition. Cally thought Terran mating systems bizarre and Byzantine. Jenna agreed with her--she couldn’t see forming some crushing, life-long union herself. She liked Blake a lot, and would have given him a bit of attention if he’d seemed inclined, but she wasn’t offended that he didn’t, and she wanted more freedom and flexibility than the responsibility of a mating bond would offer her.

Avon understood Jenna’s point of view. Avon valued his freedom. Avon valued his flexibility. Avon would nevertheless have bonded Blake at the hint of a wish, would have crawled on his hands and knees over broken glass to do it. All Blake had to do was ask. And it was vital to Avon that he _ask,_ rather than submit for any reason other than pure, voluntary willingness (Blake had never yet shown a hint of submission to anything--Avon tried not to think about what it might look like if he did). Blake had to want it, like—well, like Avon did. For the reasons he did.

But Blake, vocal proponent of Omega rights and free choice (and why, Avon thought wryly, shouldn’t he be?), of course, did not ask.

Avon had only ever wanted to bond once before. But Anna had been married, and it had been a sweet impossibility, would have given them away immediately. He’d held himself back, trembling over her, a hand firm on her neck covering the flesh that cradled the relevant gland so he couldn’t bite by accident. He’d never so much as touched her when she’d been near a cycle. Though she’d never bonded with her Unmarked husband either. She'd been his in almost every way that mattered. She’d been his to protect, though he’d failed, and that haunted him. Even though, to his horror, he was now a little _glad_ they'd never bonded, because—and he couldn’t hide from the ugliness of this—he knew it would have been the wrong decision. The wrong mating.

Because he couldn’t see himself--managing that, with Blake. He might have tried propositioning Blake on less than total terms, if he’d thought he could. But Blake was completely unashamed of what he was, and didn’t wear the typical scent-masking colognes, only going on suppressants (and disappearing discreetly into his cabin) for a few days a month, and when such discretion was vital for missions. He wore loose, comfortable clothing that showed his neck, and didn’t keep his hair close-cropped to the skull. Thus his apocrine glands were exposed and scent lingered in his hair. To Avon, Blake smelled like sex and comfort and home, whatever the hell _that_ meant. Like foods no longer produced on Earth. Wildly, Avon lashed out for equivalents: full and bloody, like the single time he’d had steak. Sweet, like the chemical-excess of a knicker-knacker delight. Sharp, like air right from a filter. Too much and perfect. And Avon knew absolutely that he could not handle anything of the kind. If he tried to touch him--careful and off-cycle, just taking the edge off for both their sakes--he thought he might well bite through his own hand to get to Blake’s neck.

Every Alpha could bond with every Alpha, Beta, Omega or New-Class Unmarked, but only exceptional instances of compatibility resulted in a pull that could bring the afflicted to his or her knees. And Avon had thought, as the clean-filtered air of the Liberator cleared the London’s double-dose of suppressants out of his lungs, and the man he’d reluctantly fallen in love with was suddenly so present that Avon could have located him anywhere on the ship, _Oh._ Of course. Of-bloody- _course_. Not ‘a carrier of some kind, probably another Alpha, under these drugs’ after all. He would have to be an Omega, _wouldn’t_ he? A highly political Omega, who Avon’s body started incessantly screaming at him to take irrevocably, and who would want less than nothing to do with him. With Avon’s gauche, uncivilized, needy demands.

Avon would have gone on a regular diet of suppressants himself, but they were hell on his concentration, and he could barely afford to be out of commission for ruts as it was. His ruts were, of course, synchronized with Blake’s heats--which was:

i.         handy, in that it compressed the ship’s most vulnerable period into a tight interval of three days,

ii.       inconvenient, in that it meant the de facto captain and second in command were simultaneously absent (Jenna’s body keeping its own irregular spacer’s time), and

iii.       humiliating, in that everyone must know, if they gave it any thought, that his body wanted Blake’s so much he lay in his room _burning_ in time with it.).

Perhaps they thought it didn’t mean anything personal. His affinity with Blake was just a biological fact. Blake and _Vila_ might have synchronized, if Avon hadn’t been there to override the Beta with his ‘louder’ signal. But Avon knew it meant everything personal.

A lot of people believed, almost as a matter of course, than an Omega wasn’t precisely leadership material. Blake didn’t even waste time proving them wrong--he just used everything at his disposal, including his sex-class, to get what he wanted. Omegas were, by design, supposed to be the nucleus of a community--to draw in people around a pair-bond, to announce that here was safety, something generative: protection and fertility and promise. Avon looked around at the people clustered to Blake, their companionship and service evidence of Blake’s charisma, and knew other people erred in thinking Alphas some sort of pack-leaders. He was just Blake’s hound--or, to be kinder to himself, the other half of the mated-pair that wasn’t.

Testing his leash only served to make its strength and short length clear. He could never leave. Why should Blake bond with him? He didn’t even have to, to secure its dubious benefits.

***

Three things sometimes made Avon wonder if Blake was toying with him. Not the clothing--it was obvious that Blake did that without a hint of malice aforethought, and with no one but himself in mind. It shouldn’t even be rude, really--it was Avon’s own vulnerability that made it affecting.

Item One: Blake fought with him constantly. True, Blake led, and thus had to contend with opposition. True, Avon himself picked many of the fights. But Blake wasn’t ignorant of what he and Avon were, and he could have de-escalated the arguments accordingly if he’d wanted to. Avon had seen him manage people splendidly in similar regards, all the time. But Blake didn’t manage Avon well at all, here. Or--he seemed not to. Avon didn’t entirely discount the idea that Blake was working according to some larger strategy here that he couldn’t quite discern. Blake let the fights play out--and they were always real, over real concerns--until Avon, at his wit’s end, felt close to losing control.

He never would. Not without Blake’s enthusiastic permission, or it would be sick and sad and mean _nothing_. Besides, Blake would never accept any bond forced upon him, and the idea of Blake rejecting his bond was the stuff of Avon’s nightmares. But Blake pushed Avon to the point where Avon’s conscious mind, frustrated and exhausted, was almost overwhelmed by his bewildered, unhappy instinctual self, got lost in a muddled mess of _why won’t you listen why don’t you submit to me why aren’t you mine_.

He had no idea why Blake would do that to him. (Because he knew Blake knew just how chemically affected by him Avon was--it would be difficult for him to miss the way Avon’s body tensed and then relaxed inexorably when he walked into a room, a puppet on a string. And Blake was nothing if not perceptive.) Perhaps Blake--couldn’t help doing it. But that didn’t seem likely.

Item Two: The worst of these arguments were about Blake’s propensity for putting them, himself, in danger. When humans had returned to earth, time and radiation had rendered the landscape dangerous, and the wildlife more so—humans hadn’t been the planet’s apex predators for a long, long time. Alphas were designed to defend. Alphas were intended to protect themselves and their mates, children and social-packs while humanity built the domes and started up the long re-terraforming process. (That process had, of course, become irrelevant by the time it was complete—sometimes Avon felt he was equally atavistic and surplus to requirements. The administration had become reliant on the domes as a mechanism of control, and would have much preferred that ancient transmatt technology hadn’t been lost to time than that their predecessors had worked to give them back the richness of the earth). When Blake said, ‘You don’t have to go, I’ll do it myself’ like that was _better_ , Avon wondered if Blake did it to _spite_ him.

Item Three: Blake talked about wanting a family. Oh, not just now. If and when. In the highly improbable event they survived and won this conflict.

Blake could bear children, of course. And he would like to, if they were terribly lucky. Avon snidely pointed out how unlikely that was, and Blake gave him a hard look and said he knew. Avon didn’t say this was torture--that Blake couldn’t, _mustn’t_ talk about the children he’d like to bear for or give someone else, when every rut Avon bred Blake in his fever-dreams and felt _whole_ , and woke up shivering, spent, dehydrated. Aching for the loss of something that never was.

***

Twice and only twice, people had assumed they were together.

One ‘your partner’ on Space City. “You’re mistaken,” Avon had said through a clenched-teeth smile.

One very kind old woman, who’d assumed they were just waiting for the next coinciding heat cycle before bonding, and had made a few remarks--you saw so few A/O couples these days, out in the colonies. The strain was breeding out. She remembered her own bonding. She wished them well.

Avon tried not to be harsh to anyone who couldn’t handle it and give their own back besides. He’d smiled and gone along with it, play-acting for the space of a few minutes. Blake had been stiff and uncharacteristically awkward. ( _Can’t you even pretend?_ Avon had thought, angry and piercingly sad.)

“If you ever learn that people prefer pleasing fictions to the truth, your political career may actually advance,” Avon had sneered, warding off any devastating remark from Blake, any eviscerating sympathy, any discussion of how, for once in his life, Avon had proved a competent actor.

***

Blake shifted uncomfortably on the flight deck couch.

“What is it?” Avon asked in a flat tone. Deliberately unconcerned. They were alone, and it was night, or the ship’s equivalent thereof.

“I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold,” Blake murmured. “I feel awful.”

“It--isn’t a cold,” Avon informed him, studying his own computer readouts carefully. Blake’s heat had been coming on for two days (early--irregularity was the curse of space travel), and it had been a peculiar, low, sweet agony to Avon. It was, of course, dragging Avon along with it, pulling him by an invisible thread. His own body temperature was higher than usual. His own cheeks were slightly blood-flushed.

“Ah,” Blake said after a moment. Possibly he was disconcerted that Avon knew better than he did. Well. That couldn’t be helped. Now he’d take himself off into his room, and switch the air-filters onto local, and take drugs and fuck himself in ways Avon didn’t let himself imagine (because there was a danger as it was, wasn’t there, in being clever enough to easily unravel his door locks and Blake’s, even in the confusion of rut). Avon would go to his own room, and filter all the air on the ship, and know a little peace.

He wanted that relief, even as he liked to put it off. How long could he stay coherent? How long could he stand to be around Blake, like this? The fact was (gratification and how _powerful_ he felt in rut aside) Avon didn’t like the days of isolation. The frantic urges interspersed with boredom, the days during which he was unable to concentrate on anything complex. The sudden, total absence of Blake, whose pheromones his body had developed a kind of reliance on (putting it that way was easier than saying he simply missed Blake’s company, though both were true). When Blake switched on the local filters, it was like he was missing or dead. Confused by rut, Avon always felt a moment’s sharp, protective panic--even though, rationally, he knew exactly what had happened, and that it _always_ happened.

“We’ve managed to put a good amount of distance between ourselves and Travis,” Avon offered. “He shouldn’t be able to come upon us at an inconvenient— What?”

Blake’s posture had shifted slightly. A bitter note, a trace of _fear_ (interesting--Blake was rarely afraid), had made its way into his scent. Perhaps, to be polite, Avon should pretend he couldn’t tell, but then Avon had never been particularly polite.

“Nothing.” Blake shook his head, looking as though he’d stand, a prelude to taking himself off.

“Why are you lying to me?” Avon demanded, narrowing his eyes.

“Because I don’t want to discuss this,” Blake snarled, working himself towards a protective anger.

He spoilt it by turning his head to look at Avon, and in so doing catching guarded concern in the other man’s expression.

“I don’t want to,” Blake said again, more gently. “But you probably deserve to know. After I’d shot Travis, when they were interrogating me, he--thought of a way to damage me, in return for the way I’d damaged him.” Avon despised where this was going. “No one likes to lose to an Omega, do they?” Blake said with false good humor.

“He--” Avon started. Stopped.

“He tried to force a bond,” Blake said matter-of-factly, staring at nothing. “But I would have had to complete the circuit, with intent. And they can torture you until you don’t know what you want, and force your mouth open, and position your teeth, and shock you until your jaw clamps down hard enough to break bones, but they can’t make you _mean_ it. With training, you can resist almost anything. If you curl into yourself and make a place they can’t touch, a room with no walls that stretches on forever, if you’re prepared to die in there, then--you can take a few things with you. The names of a few friends you’d _rather_ die than give up. A few scraps of dignity. That was my scrap. If I give myself, I intend to mean it.”

When he glanced up, Avon was looking at him with surprisingly naked sympathy. It painted his face like anguish--rippling and complex as a river in motion. Eddies and cross-currents of thought and feeling, butting against and flowing into one another.

“That’s why I lied,” Blake finished. “That’s why I--reacted like I did to the idea of Travis coming across us at an inconvenient moment.”

“I’m sorry,” Avon said in a rush, the unfamiliar words tumbling out of him like the sudden swinging give of a rusty gate.

“You’re not the one who should be sorry,” Blake said, voice brisker now, standing up. “Thank you for listening. I suspect I should have told someone that--a while ago. But I didn’t remember it, after the mind-wipe, and when I did there was so much else to do.”

“It might have proven a liability,” Avon said, in a gentle enough tone that this didn’t land as a recrimination. “Perhaps you should make the time to exorcise your ghosts. Lest they catch you up.”

“Oh, there’s never any time for what I want,” Blake said, not self-pitying but direct. “Other things _matter_ more. I can’t let myself forget that.”

“And will they always matter more?” Avon asked. “It doesn’t sound to me like much of a life.”

Blake shrugged. “I don’t need much of a life. Though there’s always hope.”

“Is there?”

“Oh yes, Avon. It’s what makes all this bearable. See you after the worst of it.”

And Blake left, and, a few minutes later, ‘died’. Or didn’t. Avon felt his stupid heart judder with it, then return to its accustomed course as he ruthlessly corrected the misapprehension

Avon wondered what Blake had wanted him to take from that conversation. He smiled, unamused, at the typical-Alpha clamor of response in his brain. Oh, what he’d _give_ to kill Travis for Blake. Not a gift Blake would want. Like Pompey’s head to Caesar. But even so.

***

The mission had a deadline that wouldn’t wait for their bodies to return to quiescence, and Blake was absolutely necessary to the mission’s success. As was Avon. Blake had to rally the planet’s rebels, and Avon had to wreck a complicated computer, through a haze of suppressants. Unfortunately the rebel group, per usual, included a lot of boisterous Alphas. They looked at Blake, on the cusp of a heat, like a god they wanted to follow and fuck and eat alive.

Avon had often been accused of bad-tempered snarling, but he’d growled like an animal at the Alpha leader who’d shaken Blake’s hand when they’d teleported down (almost grazing the live apocrine glands in Blake’s wrist). He nearly backhanded the other team’s technical expert for getting much too close to himself. This near his own rut, Avon _especially_ didn’t want to be touched. Not by just anyone, anyway.

The probe slipped in his hands, twice. He had to step back, close his eyes and breathe so as not to destroy the whole machine in his rage.

“What do you need?” Blake asked, seemingly calm--though he must have been warring against similar hormones. Avon admired his self-command, as ever. But that war wasn’t entirely invisible--Blake’s face was glossy with perspiration, his pupils dilated, and he smelled-- _god_ it was strong. Rebels, running past, occasionally caught a trace and craned their heads to look at Blake. Avon batted off unproductive impulses to shoot people on their own side.

He looked down at his hands. Too shaky, now, to use the probe effectively. At least Blake had known better than to suggest that they separate.

“Here,” Avon said. What he wanted was embarrassing, but he wasn’t exactly winning a conduct prize at the moment, and they needed to successfully complete this and get the hell out of here. Avon rolled up his sleeves, and Blake understood and _consented_. He unbuttoned the high jacked he’d worn, in deference to his condition and its effects on others. Very deliberately, swallowing, Avon rolled his wrists over Blake’s neck, exerting pressure.

Their pheromones blended, and Avon began to breathe more regularly. Now Blake would register as marked. Other ABO-carriers would stop insistently _noticing_ him. It was a good, practical idea. And Avon--felt the scent of them combined settle in his stomach like a full, good meal or a reassuring promise.

So that was what Blake would smell like claimed. If he were temporarily, or permanently, Avon’s. Better even than usual. Like _more_ of himself. At another time, it would have been distractingly arousing, but now it felt so secure. Avon felt steady again. Slightly euphoric, even. His grip firmed. He could certainly do this.

Blake took a shaky breath. “Right,” he said.

“Right.” Avon smiled blindingly at him and, with an unwavering hand, with a flourish even, did the work. He still had to concentrate, and it wasn’t his fastest job, but it was accomplished in the end.

“Do you want to go back up, now your part is over?” Blake asked, clearly sensing that Avon wouldn’t appreciate ‘Can you handle it?’ It was also a variant on the odious ‘you don’t have to go, I’ll do it myself’, but Avon didn’t mind, just now, because that wasn’t how this would play out. And with Blake smelling like _that_ , the question felt like protective concern from a mate rather than a dismissal.

Avon shook his head, still smiling, and Blake looked away deliberately and waded into the fray, Avon at his side. Avon took a special pleasure in guarding Blake’s back, the aggression involved just pushing him harder, the heat making him sharper and faster, such a _good_ killer, and for Blake. He and Blake were very careful not to touch.

They left when the job was done without making civil apologies to the local rebels (Cally could convey their regrets perfectly well--better than Avon, who didn’t have any). Avon strode away from Blake in the teleport bay with a precise, controlled step that disintegrated in his room, where he slid down the back of the closed door. He let himself think, and it rushed in like a flood.

_Blake knows, he let me, he wanted it, stood there and took it, and he smelled--_

Avon wrestled himself out of his clothing and put his wrist (which reeked of the pheromone blend) to his face and breathed the potent liquor in. Mouth open in a moue of something like surprise (when nothing about this surprised him, particularly), Avon made himself take it slow, one arm across his face and the other snaking down to pull at his cock. Lazily, at first--albeit with a shaking hand. Prolonging it. Letting his cock swell, and the knot firm and harden.

He liked to start with a satisfying, tantalizing lesser fantasy. Often he went for Blake sucking him off, Avon fisting his hand in Blake’s scented curls while Blake, on his knees in front of him, circumnavigated Avon’s knot with his tongue. Teasing it. Taking first the head of Avon’s cock and then, finally, when he felt Avon was properly desperate for it, allowing the full length of him into that generous mouth of his. Lips firm against the bulge of his knot at the base.

But Blake had been so impressive today that Avon felt an obscure need to reward him. So, in his mind, he settled himself on Blake’s lap and sank onto Blake’s cock (which was distinctly impressive, for a non-Alpha. Thanks to the London’s communal showers Avon had some evidence of this, though he hadn’t been close enough to figure out the ‘not an Alpha’ bit at the time) and used the pistoning strength of his excellent genetic design to bounce frantically, rubbing his cock and its bulbous knot on Blake’s stomach until they both came.

And because this was a fantasy, Blake was wonderfully grateful for Avon’s part in the whole mission, and was desperate to reward him with another orgasm. Blake presented himself for Avon’s pleasure (Avon skipped Cally’s yoga sessions because he was reasonably sure that if he saw Blake in anything like a lordosis position he’d lose his damned mind). He took his time getting Fantasy-Blake ready (epivagination was one of the geneticists’ better efforts —a prostate and a clitoris and a cock all to play with— there was no point _not_ giving Blake an orgasm with his hands or his mouth, just to start as he meant to go on). Fantasy-Blake had a lot to say about how much he wanted this, how perfect it felt, how he’d never put himself in danger like that again, how grateful he was for Avon’s protection, how he loved Avon for reasons that had nothing to do with their genetic compatibility, he’d been stupid to hold out for so long, please would Avon bite him, please, _please_ , Avon.

_Well_ , if Blake insisted. Avon breathed in hard, flooding himself with Blake’s pheromones, and probably he’d hate himself in the morning but he didn’t right now. He eased into Blake with a tender slowness, but Blake wanted it harder, and Avon _did_ want to oblige him. Perhaps Blake shouldn’t have been so commanding, but Avon didn’t mind being bossed around, provided it was something he wanted to do anyway. Whatever Blake needed, he’d give him. Reality didn’t intrude as Avon leaned over Blake and bit his neck soundly, to the accompaniment of Blake’s whimper (he knew he was shorter, and that he’d never manage that in the flesh, but that didn’t matter right now).

Then he decided he wanted to look at Blake, and so with the fluidity of dreams they’d switched positions and Blake was on his back, and Avon was leaning down so Blake could bite _him_ , choose _him_. Avon’s eyes slipped closed and he whispered Blake’s name (he might have done that in reality, too—he wasn’t thinking very clearly at the moment) and fucked Blake until he knotted him properly. He let Blake, in the long, shaking period of satiation, explain at length how much he’d meant it when he’d claimed he loved Avon while they were fucking.

And because it was a fantasy, Avon could divulge the same without the slightest embarrassment. He could tell Blake that Blake was everything he’d ever admired in people: intelligence and humor and fair-mindedness, determination and strength of will, a capacity for compassion that impressed him against his better judgment. That he’d known since he’d met him that Blake was the best man he ever wanted to meet, that Blake was something like a miracle, that having him was an honor, that Avon would die before failing him.

He’d repeat the procedure again and again, until Blake dropped, until his own knees gave out, until hunger and thirst stopped them, because instinct drove him to be sure he’d bred Blake. Even the words, even the idea of breeding Blake, rushed through his brain like a surge of electricity, and Avon whimpered and twisted into his orgasm.

Another two and a half days of this, he thought, making his way to the bed, wincing as his back registered its complaints. (The recriminations would make themselves known in another minute. They always did.) But there were worse ways to spend the time, Avon supposed.

***

Too early. He knew it the second he made it to the flight deck, found Blake alone there, and lurched because the proximity was much too much. This rut must be hours longer than the others. Either that, or Blake’s presence had triggered reverberations. Apparently the hormone-mingling down on the planet had convinced Avon’s body it had real work to do, at last.

Judging by the stiffening of his posture, Blake knew where Avon was, and was apparently coming to similar conclusions.

Avon opened his mouth to say, “I’ll go first”, because colliding in the corridor would be a poor idea just now, but instead found himself saying, desperately,

“ _Are_ we compatible?”

He froze. He’d never asked Blake this. Never wanted to know, if the answer was ‘no’.

Omegas had better senses of smell than Alphas did, and were more sensitive to compatibility. What seemed perfect to Avon, Blake _might_ be able to detect a note of rottenness in. A foul and fatal flaw. And if that was why he’d never offered, never asked, then--it would break Avon’s heart, to know it absolutely. Both that it was true, and that Blake considered _that_ sufficient grounds to reject him on, when Avon himself was prepared to work through anything he could think of.

“You know we are,” Blake murmured, sitting on the couch, facing ahead, not looking at him.

“There’s nothing wrong?” Avon insisted. In for a penny.

“No,” Blake said after a moment. “There isn’t anything wrong.”

Avon walked over to the couch, unable to stop himself, framing the back of Blake’s shoulders with his hands. “I’d--” he swallowed. “I’d keep you safe.”

Blake breathed. “Avon.”

Avon pressed on, threading a shaking hand through Blake’s hair, releasing a little of Blake’s scent and biting his lip against an answering gasp, trailing Blake’s curls across his own wrist. There, now. That perfect, satisfying aroma. His claim refreshed. Blake all over him.

“I’d provide for you,” he whispered. “I could. I’ve thought of so many ways.” It was all he could think about, some nights. After particularly dangerous missions.

“Please--” Blake said softly, and Avon heard the _don’t_ Blake didn’t quite manage to get out, but dropped to his knees anyway, pressing his mouth to Blake’s neck, not letting Blake feel the teeth, just pressing his lips to the skin chastely. Breathing on it. Breathing Blake in.

“Totally secure,” he continued. “No one could touch us--” Avon laughed suddenly, quick and jagged. “Present company excepted, of course. I’d kill--oh, I’d kill anyone who looked at you, if you didn’t like the way they did it.”

“Are you high?” Blake asked. His voice steady. Such self-command. Oh, he did admire Blake. Blake was perfect. Why wasn’t Blake _his?_

“You know I am,” Avon said, slightly plaintively. “I can’t help it. I want you so much it aches. I hurt from not touching you. Do you understand that?”

“Of course I do,” Blake hissed.

“I could make you happy,” Avon said softly, nuzzling over the skin that covered the gland that could bind them. “I could make you _so_ happy, Blake. Perhaps you don’t think so. I can understand that. But I’d work at it. I would give you anything. I know you miss your family. I’d be your— I’d _give_ you a family, Blake. _God_ I want to give you children.” He breathed it out reverently. “You want them. You said you did. And we’d have such _perfect_ , beautiful children. You see that, don’t you?”

Everyone would look at Blake and see he was Avon’s. He always glowed--he’d bloody bioluminess, bearing: all the warmth and life in him dialed up. And Avon would adore anything he and Blake made together. The children would worship Blake, they’d love him. They’d be clever and handsome and strong. The whole raveled sleeve of Avon’s life would be knit up. Blake could never leave him, by death or by design, couldn’t go without taking Avon with him. Blake would never have to be reminded of what he’d been through: the memorywipe, Travis, any of it. As the years slipped by, it would all start to feel like a bad dream, fading with the morning—less real and important than the life Avon had given him.

“Just ask me. Please, ask me. Let me have you, take you. Why don’t you want me? I would do anything for you—”

“I can’t. Avon, I can’t.” Blake sounded like he was being tortured, and Avon felt a stab of sympathy even as his stomach twisted.

“ _Why?_ ” he asked, voice harsh, pressing his teeth against Blake’s skin without pressure and clocking Blake’s shiver of want.

“I’ve lost one family already,” Blake said, keeping his voice slow and steady. Bringing out the worst of it, to ground himself. “There’s so much I have to do. I can’t _stop_ now. I can’t carry a bond that could kill me if we were separated. I can’t do that to you, either. Avon, you _couldn’t_ — _nothing_ can keep us safe but _this_. There’s nowhere far enough to run, and I refuse to _run_ any longer. This is more important than us.”

Avon had never actually hated Blake's politics before, but he found he loathed them now, intensely.

“We’ve been living in one another’s pockets too long. You don’t mean half of this, it isn’t _like_ you. It’s just biology,” Blake murmured, bringing the feeling in his voice under control. Rolling it flat. Taking himself somewhere Avon couldn’t follow. “And we’re stronger than our bodies.”

Just biology. Avon wanted to be sick. He straightened up. Took a step back. Turned on his heel, away from Blake.

“This didn’t happen,” he told Blake.

“What didn’t happen?” Blake finished humorlessly.

Avon walked away and shivered out the hangover of his rut in his room, refusing to touch himself. He couldn’t bear to imagine Blake right now, and he couldn’t bear to imagine anyone else.

But it must have happened, because Blake started using the vast array of products designed to hide what he was. Mild suppressants, only as weak as they were because Blake couldn’t afford to lose focus. The Liberator cycled the air almost constantly, now--Blake designed the program and made Avon install it, like a punishment. Longer containment periods. Chemical deodorants and perfumed razors and scented shampoos for his now-twice-daily showers. He reeked of confusing artificial scents, and underneath that, there was sometimes almost nothing of him.

_I am going blind,_ Avon thought. He had to force himself not to panic when he could no longer tell where Blake was on the ship. When his awareness of Blake was vague and diffuse, ebbing and flowing--an extended version of the sensory deprivation Avon had endured when Blake used local filters during his heats. When he stood right next to Blake, and Blake was only half there with him.

***

With the smell of Blake’s blood in his nostrils and the memory of how exactly Travis had tried to break Blake brought firmly to mind, it was almost too easy to shoot and disable Travis--and then to walk right up to him and snap his neck. And by his expression, Travis had known exactly what it was for.

It felt _so_ good. This, of course, had been one of the major drawbacks of the ABO genetic model--a tendency towards dominance battles and aggression. Soothing endorphins flooded Avon, even in the midst of the crisis. Hadn’t he killed a threat to the pack’s safety, to _Blake’s?_ Hadn’t he eliminated a competing claimant for Blake? _Now be a good, grateful Omega and **finally**_ _let me fuck you--_ _Oh shut_ **_up_** , he told his singing, victorious blood, fighting the mad smile off his lips before he turned around.

“Is Travis dead?” Blake asked, at the wrong angle to see it, wounded and confused. The slight uncertainty in Blake’s normally sure, steady tone fogged Avon’s brain for an instant--but no, Blake didn’t want to be comforted. He didn’t particularly feel like comforting Blake, at the moment. Or at least the sane part of him didn’t. This whole Star One fiasco was Blake’s idiotic idea, and Blake ought to have let Avon present him with Travis’s blood-smeared corpse a year ago.

Avon brought his panting breathing back under control. “He is now.” And if he sounded _far_ too satisfied, well. Blake would have to deal with that.

With effort, he concentrated on the mission rather than falling into some idiotic snarling, whimpering, protective huddle over what his hindbrain insisted on identifying as his wounded mate.

Later, when he and Blake were separated and every rumor of Blake’s presence proved false, he rather regretted that he hadn’t gone and done it anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

“Here,” Blake snarled, taking off his jacket and turning his head to the side, baring his neck. “There’s an easy way to be sure of me, isn’t there.”

In the offer, Avon lost his almost-hysterical fear that Blake was a bounty hunter, had turned against him in some bewildering, devastating way. It was just the sort of stereotypical display of vulnerability calculated to soothe an Alpha, and he _knew_ it, and it still worked like a charm, because it was Blake doing it. He hadn’t seen Blake in two years, hadn’t tasted him in the air. The very texture of the world richer and better for Blake being in it. (And Blake hadn’t showered today, and was smelling particularly--Blake.)

But even still, the offer rankled, and he frowned at Blake, annoyed through the purr of his mollified instincts.

“Not interested?” Blake asked bitterly. “Oh I _know_ I haven’t had a very flattering two years--” Avon laughed, short and sharp, at the idea that that could matter, “but if you can’t trust me, if you think _I_ might have betrayed _you_ , well, here’s insurance, Avon. Since you need it.”

And Avon could see how _hurt_ Blake was, but even so, Avon had moved through a gamut of intense emotional states in the past minutes (day, years), and now landed on ‘fucking furious’. Avon had blown past his capacity for shame some minutes ago.

“How dare you?” he demanded of Blake.

Blake’s chest heaved. “ _Me?_ If someone had asked me ten minutes ago whether _you_ could _ever_ think it, I’d have said it was _beyond_ _possibility_.”

“Haven’t you already? How dare you _run from me_ because I told you I loved you? And then, _then_ , when I _finally_ manage to track you down and _crawl_ back to you, having scraped and scraped to come to you with some proof that I could make good on my offer, or at least carry on your work, after I ended up with _nothing_ to give you and still came anyway because I didn’t know where else to go and I couldn’t bear to stay away any longer — How dare you throw _the possibility of bonding you_ in my _face?_ ”

Avon didn’t really care that there were other people in the room. Blake didn’t seem to notice that there were.

“You’re--in love with me?”

Avon felt his face spasm. “How many times do you want to be told, Blake?”

“ _Once_ would have been _nice!_ ” Blake shouted back.

A red-headed man ran in to announce that he’d just heard Federation troops had infiltrated the base. Blake’s bodyguard, a small, dark-haired woman, glanced at Blake and drew her gun. Perfectly excusable, under the circumstances. The base was under attack, and Blake was her commanding officer. But she smelled wrong, and Avon shot to stun her on instinct.

“What the _hell_ was that for?” Blake roared.

“Was she new, by any chance?” Avon asked. The red-haired man nodded. “It’s an interesting coincidence, isn’t it, that the Federation should find you just now. That she should look at Blake _quite_ like that, before going for her gun. I’m not condemning her outright--I simply prefer her stunned rather than armed at the moment. We can sort it out later.” Blake's new technician nodded again. Nodded like he was _taking an order_.

“Don’t Alpha my people,” Blake said in a severe tone.

“ _I am_ your people,” Avon reminded him.

Blake didn’t dispute it. Blake _did_ take charge, which Avon found comfortingly familiar.

“Well, come on—we’d better coordinate the defense from inside the bunker. It’s shielded. Someone help me with Klyn and Arlen. Deva, this is Vila, and that’s--”

“Avon,” Deva said dryly, pulling Klyn (Vila took her feet). “Yes, I gathered. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Oh, good,” Avon deadpanned back, dragging Arlen.

“I’m Dayna, if anyone cares.” She covered their retreat

“And I’m Soolin.” She scanned the room’s entrances, gun at the ready. “I don’t particularly care if you care. But you probably should.”

“And you _never_ said you were in love with me,” Blake hissed as he helped Avon with Arlen (though Avon didn’t seem to need it). “I asked, ‘are you high’, you said, ‘yes’. I considered the conversation--”

“Are you absolutely stupid. Why am I asking, what the _hell_ was this bounty hunter plan?”

“Get in,” Deva murmured under his breath. Avon’s people decided they quite liked Deva.

“Will you _listen?_ I am _trying_ to tell you I that assumed you were just biologically attracted to me, that you were suffering from a particularly nasty, coercive genetic intoxicant. You opened the floor by talking about our bloody pheromonal compatibility -- but, Avon, I was always more than _biologically_ interested in you--”

“'More than biologically interested'?” Avon sneered.

“ _Enough,_ Avon.” Blake put Arlen down. straightened up and slammed the bunker’s initial door shut behind them. Avon dropped his half of Arlen like she was filthy. “I have been _in love_ with you since back when I thought you were another Omega.”

Avon's eyes had gone wide, but he appeared to be processing bits of information erratically, and one at a time. “You thought I was what.”

“Something wrong with being thought an Omega, Avon?” Blake, uncoupling the blast doors from their heavy security latches, looked over at him, an eyebrow raised.

“ _Obviously no_. Where—ah,” Avon located the sealing-bar for himself and dragged it off its rack. “Whereas I’ve been in love with you since I thought you were probably another Alpha. Why aren’t these on automatics?”

“Which of us knows how industrial door programming works?”

“You’re an engineer, and your tech lead surely—”

“I’m busy. Deva’s a _developer_.”

“Oh for _god’s_ sake—what about your other objections?”                                                                                                                      

“Oh, they were real. I find they matter less to me now, after the time apart, but at the time I took them very seriously indeed. Though I still couldn’t ethically have children at present. And I still don’t want to endanger you by—”

“That isn’t your choice,” Avon snarled, helping Blake secure the blast doors in lockdown-position.

“It certainly _is_ ,” Blake grunted and panted sliding his half into place, _damn_ these things were heavy, and he lacked Avon’s deceptive genetic strength, “ _but_ I’m starting to _think_ we’ve made it, even without the bond. Similarly, you seemed to think my lack of political involvement a prerequisite, then, and to have changed your mind since. As I _suggested_ , I didn’t think you reciprocated my interest--not really. And so I stayed away, because I couldn’t—stand— _there_.” The doors latched and sealed. Avon dropped the bar into place, whirled and grabbed Blake’s shoulders.

“Shut up,” Avon murmured, inclining his head to finally, _finally_ \--

“No, _no_ don’t _kiss_ me, we’re _actually being invaded_ , Avon, focus!”

With a ‘you and your excuses’ sort of look, Avon lifted his hands, took a step back and attempted to control his hormones. Blake facilitated him by taking a step back (and a deep breath himself).

“So Blake isn’t a bounty hunter?” Tarrant asked, and Avon rolled his eyes and wondered why he’d loaded up his new crew with hot-headed Alphas.

“No,” Blake said with infinite patience. “I’m not _really a bounty hunter_ , Tarrant.”

“Good,” Dayna snorted. “Avon would’ve flipped his lid. And everyone else’s, probably.”

They’d closed the blast doors just in time. They heard the sound of heavy, booted footsteps coming at a run. Blake lunged for the intercom, pulled off his annoying fake eye-injury prosthesis, accepted a wet towel Deva tossed him to rub his face clean with and proceeded to bark orders and coordinate a defense strategy from inside the bunker. At some point Avon decided he was doing it wrong, and Blake rolled his eyes and let Avon guide Blake’s people through something complicated and technical he wanted to do to re-establish the base’s shields to prevent this lot from getting bolstered by reinforcements. There was a lot of ‘and what does the wire _next t_ o the burned wire look like?’

“Incidentally, Blake’s neglected to mention that _we_ are trapped in a security bunker. If you could see your way through to clearing us--” Avon’s voice indicated this wasn’t a suggestion.

***

“I want that one strapped down,” Avon told an orderly some time later, pointing to Arlen.

“Right, and I want a tea break. Who are you?” the orderly asked, fairly.

“Avon,” Blake began with exasperation (“ _Oh_ ,” the orderly said, and started doing as he was told), “you haven’t a shred of proof. I tested her! She passed!”

“And I don’t like the smell of her. Which of us has a higher level of paranoia, more conducive to survival? I want her questioned, and possibly for Orac to look into her. That is all I ask, Blake.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Blake said shortly.

“Thank you.”

Blake waved this off and went to direct clean-up efforts. They might have to leave the base full-stop--but the shield was up and running again, and they were safe for now. There were only so many Federation troops on GP (correction: there had only been so many, and judging by the body count the botched attack had wiped the bulk of them out), and this lot wouldn’t have made it inside the base, it seemed, if someone hadn’t disabled the shielding from within. Avon might well have been right about Arlen, Blake mused. God he hated it when Avon was right.

As the clean-up was winding down, he asked after Avon. He learned that the other man had waltzed in, ordered the technical repair teams about to his satisfaction (not necessarily to theirs--but they all knew who he was, especially after the shield-repair, and pretty much accepted that he was their new lord and master), sent a salvage team out to the remains of the Scorpio, gone to fetch Orac, come back with it, and then taken himself off for a shower, having dumped his people, save the hospitalized Tarrant, with Blake’s quartermaster.

“Where’s he showering?” Blake asked said quartermaster, bemused.

“Oh, er,” the woman said awkwardly, “your room, I think.”

Right. So, Avon had just asked ‘Which quarters are Blake’s?’ in a sufficiently authoritative tone and been told, had he?

“People need to stop just _listening_ to Alphas,” Blake complained to no one in particular, because this was just embarrassingly regressive bullshit. “Are we the revolution, or aren’t we?”

Avon was clearly riding high on battle hormones (and possibly on proximity to an Omega who’d essentially agreed to bond with him at his earliest convenience), more sure of himself even than usual.

The woman raised an eyebrow at him. “Actually, I was thinking it was exactly what you would have done--did you do workshops, back on the Liberator? Congratulations, by the way.”

He glared at her.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him, trying not to grin.

Disgusted, he dropped into the canteen and scooped a fair amount of supplies into a rucksack. He told Deva he might--be a while.

“I guessed,” Deva said, mouth twitching. “And then Avon informed me of the same thing.”

Blake gritted his teeth and made his way back to his room.

“Have you told _everyone?_ ” he asked Avon (showered, stupid jacket shoved in Blake’s laundry basket, visible at the top, dressed in clean black trousers and a turtleneck Blake suspected someone had brought back from Scorpio for him, sitting on Blake’s bed and using Blake’s datapad, no doubt having broken through the encryption and started looking through his files. He’d even _tidied_ a little).

“Not quite yet,” Avon said, not looking up at him, but smiling at the datapad. He leaned over to investigate Blake’s rucksack as Blake headed to the bathroom. “Oh, you remembered food and water.” Avon tsked at having missed a trick himself. “Well, I suppose I was distracted.”

“Yes, it’s been a _busy day_ ,” Blake said with thick irony. “What’s this?” Blake picked up a packet on the backroom counter.

“Birth control,” Avon said succinctly. “It’s a monthly injection. Side-effects are minimal. According to your physician--”

Blake thunked his head into the bathroom door. “Must you enjoy this _quite_ so much?”

“Now let me think--yes.” Avon cleared his throat. “If you could--shower, and we could get on with it, I would appreciate that. This isn’t as easy as it looks.”

Blake suddenly noticed the way Avon’s hands were gripping the datapad very, very carefully.

“Having trouble?” he said, making his voice a little too intimate. He’d always enjoyed what that did to Avon, what _he_ did to Avon, though he’d _really_ tried not to, when he'd thought Avon didn't want him to be doing it. Nothing had ever made him feel stronger, more in control of his own body or more desirable than the way Avon could look at him. And that had been especially important, especially welcome and precious to him, after his body had betrayed him under interrogation and he'd been forced to live as something other than himself for years.

For all Avon had often accused Blake of being obsessive, Blake was far better at multitasking than Avon. And Avon had just come out of a series of high-stress encounters. He was probably significantly more hormonally compromised than Blake at present, and Blake wasn’t feeling absolutely well himself.

“Don’t--”

“Don’t what, Avon?” Blake said, leaving the door open and taking off his jacket. Avon deliberately looked at the datapad and nothing else.

“What are you reading?” Blake asked, faux-innocently, knowing now that Avon hadn’t seen a word since he’d come through the door. Blake started on the buttons of his shirt. Taking his time. “Are you sure you want to do this tonight? You’re tired.” He rolled his shoulders, casually, tone dropping into mock-sympathy. “Perhaps we should wait.”

Avon ignored the jibes. “Punishment, Blake?”

“You _did_ imply I’d betrayed you. And _gone Fed,”_ he said, pronouncing the words with distaste.

“I’m sorry,” Avon said, sounding like he meant it. “That was stupid. I was half-mad. Though that is no excuse.”

“Yes, it was. And it is a bit of one. On a less dramatic note, you _have_ made yourself very free of my room.”

“Bad habit,” Avon conceded. “I picked it up after you left. You were gone, and I couldn’t quite help myself from spending ruts in your room. Then ordinary nights, if I felt particularly sorry for myself. And then--well. Servalan was not, I suppose, entirely without grounds for thinking I smelled claimed.”

Blake didn’t feel up to teasing him, in the face of that. “Ten minutes,” he promised.

Avon nodded tightly. “Right.”

Blake shut the door and the shower clicked on, and Avon wondered how, after years, ten minutes could feel quite so long.

Blake emerged clean, in a dressing gown. Avon breathed.

“I see you’re off the suppressants again. I--hated them, you know.”

Blake leaned against the doorframe. “I thought at the time that you were relieved. That I should always have done that, for your sake, given that you hardly asked to be attracted to someone you didn’t even like. That it had been selfish, on my part, not to.”

“I could never stand it when you kept yourself to yourself.” Avon’s eyes were pulled to the red raised mark on the Blake’s forearm. He’d taken the injection, then. Avon fought down the part of him that identified medication he himself had brought into the room as poison, that wanted to suck it from the wound.

Blake took a step closer to the bed, and Avon shut his eyes and caught Blake’s wrist and licked, taking the pheromones directly into his mouth. The shower had diluted them, and Blake was off-heat, but direct from the source they remained rich and potent.

“I wonder if we’re still in sync?” Blake murmured, voice low, and Avon shuddered.

“We don’t have to,” Avon said. “If--you are tired.”

Blake laughed. “Obviously we’re tired. And obviously, we do have to. Though it’s very kind of you to offer. What did you plan to do, stretch out beside me and _writhe_ with wanting to fuck me while I slept?”

“It doesn’t sound like that bad a night,” Avon said, half a gasp in the words.

“No,” Blake conceded, “but I’m sure you’ve some better ideas. And if you don’t, I have a few myself.”

Blake sat down on the bed, as though they did this every day. They would now, Avon supposed. The small vastness of it settled strangely in him. These were the details that would make up a quite different life. He moved down the bed to sit next to Blake, letting Blake half pull him by the hand.

“You told me, once, that you wanted me to request this,” Blake said.

Avon smiled at him for remembering. “I did, didn’t I?”

Blake raised his eyebrows. Avon raised his. The ‘well?’ went unspoken. Avon had waited years for this, and wasn’t going to settle for approximations.

Deliberately, maintaining eye contact and retaining Avon’s hand, Blake sank to his knees on the floor before Avon. Making submission strength, as Avon had always suspected he would.

“Please,” Blake said simply, looking up at him.

“Please what?” Avon breathed, and Blake smirked a little because he could see Avon wasn’t being difficult. He simply loved the moment, long-awaited and transcendent, and wanted it to last. There would only be one such shattering arrival, and it had a shade of sanctity that was in no conflict with its carnality.

There was an embarrassment of verbs to choose from, in response, and Blake found that none of them was quite sufficient. Blake settled for something rather more eloquently direct. He turned his head, tucking his chin to his shoulder and exposing his neck.

“Please, Avon,” he said, voice deep and decided.

It was what Avon had always wanted to hear. Avon could feel the smile tugging across his face--the too sharp, too delighted testament to too bright a joy. The words made him want to snap at Blake’s neck like an animal--but no, not just yet, not _quite_ yet. He felt an equal desire to spool this out, to make it last, to push himself to the edge of desperation.

“Well now,” Avon murmured, “all you had to do was ask.” He could hear his voice slip into too tender a register, but was too pleased and too flushed with lust by the request, by Blake, here and alive and on his knees before him, to resent it. Besides, he--could be that, with Blake, without embarrassment. Blake deserved it.

He ran his knuckles over Blake’s cheek, his wrists over Blake’s neck--mapping the major scent points like a ritual, claiming his mate elaborately. The resulting rising tide of pheromones made Blake’s chest rise and fall faster, and Avon relished seeing Blake so affected by _him_.

“You know what this consists of, don’t you?” Avon said as he took his time. The accusation of knowledge was almost carnal--half the bedroom-tone of calling him a slut. “When you wish to bond, your body produces a certain enzyme. When that enzyme comes into contact with a partner’s conigium glandis, via a bite, it rewrites that partner’s entire biology--provided, of course, that they perform an identical operation.” His voice spooled out, low, rough, even a touch thready--he got off on this, he knew. It was so absolute. He was about to change Blake’s very _biology_ , irrevocably. Telling Blake just how he was going to own him was more intimate and obscene even than explaining to Blake how he was about to fuck him. “A single contact permanently alters your pheromone production, causes an empathic surge, sparks an estrous cycle--” Blake’s eyes were lit with fondness, and his lip had quirked. “What’s so amusing?”

“Of course you go in for seductive technobabble,” Blake chuckled. “In case I’d forgotten who I’d gone to bed with.” He shook his head. “It’s surprisingly good, mind you. You’re so perfectly yourself.”

“And was there much danger of your forgetting?” Avon felt a hormonal spike of aggression at the suggestion.

“No,” Blake said, leaning into Avon’s hand on his face. “I did tell you that if I gave myself, I intended to mean it. And I only ever intended to give myself to you. Go on then, Avon. Do it to me.” He made provocative eye contact, and reversed Avon’s operations, stroking his own wrists over Avon’s scent points, talking as he did so. His voice was an insinuating rumble. “Remake me. Take me, down to my muscles and bones and blood. Fuck me forever. Own me. Make me yours.”

Avon stared at him in a paroxysm of want for a half an instant— _god,_ Blake knew what did it for him--before falling on Blake with a snarl, sinking his teeth deep into the supple muscle where Blake’s neck met his shoulder. Blake’s big hands came up to clutch Avon to him, and he breathed Avon’s name as Avon worked his teeth deep in, letting the enzyme take hold, noting how Blake’s breathing was already starting to change--a rising heat causing him to clutch at Avon’s head a little desperately, pressing Avon into the wound.

“More,” Blake encouraged with a gasp, “harder,” and Avon whimpered into the bite, trying to give it to him. “That’s it,” Blake groaned. “I--” His voice was losing some of its coherence, he was starting to slur.

He moved, drugged, to bite Avon in return, and Avon slid back. “Not just yet,” he said with a wicked, delighted grin. They had the whole cycle to complete the circuit, and he rather liked the idea of a few hours where he was totally in control while Blake gagged for him (not that he thought he was going to get that long--he suspected age had not withered the sympathy between their cycles). The bond would fade if Avon didn’t let Blake complete it, but a full Federation bombardment couldn’t have stopped Avon from seeing this through now.

“Up on the bed, Blake.”

And here, in this specific context, in Blake’s bedroom, _their_ bedroom, he could pull on Blake’s as-yet one-sided bond, and could also throw a touch of Alpha command into his voice. He’d never tried that during their arguments on the Liberator, even when he’d most wanted to override Blake for his own good. Blake would have resented it enormously and shrugged him off despite the compulsion, and Avon would have felt it as an embarrassing, excruciating exposure and rejection. Strong-willed as he was Blake could have fought him now, even through the arousal caused by the bite. But he didn’t _want_ to. The fact that he’d consented to be governed made the act intoxicating.

Through the daze of an oncoming heat, Blake scrambled up onto the bed for him. Avon wondered if he’d overdone it a little in his own excitement, because Blake snapped into a fuckable posture with alacrity. A full, instinctual presentation, shoulders down and spine curving up, arse high: an invitation. Blake made a slight sound--like a whine, like begging. Avon licked his dry lips. Just looking at Blake like this, in a position he’d put Blake in, made him hard. (He had been, incidentally, so right to avoid Cally’s yoga.)

Dragging his hands over Blake’s shivering neck and then down, Avon eased Blake out of his robe. He paused to work his hand over the bitten muscle, massaging the enzyme deeper in, imagining it seeping down to the bone. He wanted it to take, strongly. Blake gasped as he did it.

He pulled back to get out of his own clothes, and Blake made a hurt sound at having been left.

“I know,” Avon soothed. “Here.” He stepped back, running his hand along the curve of Blake’s spine and up over his arse. Touching his soft and firm, fever-hot body felt as good as Avon had imagined it must, and better. Avon knelt behind Blake and nudged with a knee, and Blake spread his legs obligingly. Blake’s body was working overtime, preparing itself for him, and the smell of Omega heat pheromones made Avon hiss appreciatively. He trailed his fingers across the mound of Blake’s cunt and then pushed three in at once, making Blake whimper into the pillow and squirm when Avon pushed hard against his prostate, even as his thumb pressed steadily into Blake’s clit. He started to work slow, grinding circles against both.

“Do you like that?” he asked. Blake didn’t give a terribly coherent answer, rocking back on Avon’s hand instead. “ _Blake_ ,” Avon pressed, almost sing-songing it, “stay with me.” He threw a bit of command on the words. He watched Blake raise his head and fight his own heat for clarity. It must have been extraordinarily difficult, but Blake managed, because he was _so_ strong, and Avon had told him to. Avon throbbed with lust, watching him struggle.

“Good,” Blake managed. “It’s very--”

“It?” Avon asked, voice steady (a monumental effort).

“You,” Blake corrected himself.

“That’s right. You’re _excessively_ wet for me. How much do you want me, Blake?”

“Can’t you tell? Should’ve known you’d make a meal of this,” Blake panted, impressively coherent.

Avon grinned. “Yes, you should have.”

He pulled out of Blake (he felt he could live off the needy, desperate whine that produced), turned Blake over, slid his hand back where it had been and bent to take Blake’s cock into his mouth. Blake’s hips surged, and he fucked Avon’s mouth fervently. Avon let the sloppy, frantic blowjob continue for a minute, then pulled away. He’d just wanted a taste. He preferred to have Blake hard when he took him, rubbing desperately against the bedding or Avon himself, and there were other ways to make Blake come before he deigned to fuck him. He dove down, shoving his mouth where his thumb had been and pumping his fingers in Blake’s cunt (Blake’s erect cock obligingly lifting out of the way and pulling his testes up with it, making the business only slightly awkward, thank you _very_ intelligent design).

Blake seemed both to want the hard, wet, insistent pressure on his clit and to be confused as to why he was being fucked by Avon’s _fingers,_ rather than his cock.

“ _Avon_ \--” he protested, canting his hips up.

Avon sat up, fingers still working relentlessly, mouth and chin slick. “I want you _very_ prepared for this,” he explained, bending to kiss Blake for what, he realized with insane giddiness (when _he_ was supposed to be the one in control), was actually the first time. The coyness of their first kiss was beautifully undercut by the fact that he tasted like Blake’s cunt, that he was making Blake taste himself with a thrust of his tongue. Blake didn’t seem to mind, if his moan was any indication.

 _That’s right_ , Avon thought, _I did that to you_.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Avon said, pulling back an inch. “Much,” he added with a grin, moving his hand faster and biting Blake’s lower lip. He felt Blake shudder a climax around his hand and fucked him harder through it, kept going. In heat, Omegas craved a ridiculous amount of use. Blake could take another orgasm and still want more, easily. If Avon could open Blake up enough, his knot would glide right in, and he could take Blake as hard as he liked. And he thought he’d like it _quite_ hard, just now. His erection was stiff, and even outside of Blake’s body his knot was starting to swell.

Blake tried to force it faster, growling and struggling on Avon’s fingers, fighting him--cunt slick and fluttering with aftershocks. But Avon paced him ruthlessly (even as he _loved_ Blake bucking for more of him, wanted to dissolve into a hurried mess himself in answer).

“I need you,” Blake gasped, unprompted. His body was overheated, twitching. Like this, nothing was more important to Blake than Avon--for these days, Avon would be literally all that mattered to Blake. Avon found that both intoxicating and an awful reminder that it wasn’t always the case. Taking care of Blake bled sweetly into hurting him.

“Do you?” Avon asked, his words precise but his voice scarcely controlled. “As I recall, you ran from me. Two years, Blake. Did you ‘need me’ then?” Blake twisted on his hand, and Avon smiled bitterly. “Good, isn’t it? I’m going to make it _very_ good for you. By the time we’re through I’ll know everything, everything you like. I’ll _make_ _you_ ‘need me’. Didn’t I _tell you_ I could make you happy?”

“You always did-- even when you made me miserable.” Blake was struggling against the waves of want, trying to think, trying not to just keen and beg for satisfaction. “I shouldn’t have left you alone,” Blake got out, and Avon’s heart constricted, because that--was exactly it. _He_ couldn’t have left Blake alone for two years, any more than he could have given up his sanity.

Blake claimed he’d loved Avon all the while, but that hadn’t kept him with Avon, so what did it mean or matter? Maybe if Blake loved what Avon could do to his body, if he was dependent on that, grew addicted to it--between that and the bond, perhaps Blake wouldn’t think Avon was optional, disposable.

“I’m sorry,” Blake whimpered, and Avon felt a stab of dislike for himself, for hurting Blake like this, for needing infinite, infantile reassurances. His hand stilled. Blake continued, babbling through the heat. “Everything you said that night was too good, I wanted it _so much_ , and you didn’t mean any of it, I didn’t think you _meant_ any of it. I thought it was for _what_ I was, not me, thought you never wanted _me_ , and it hurt, I’m _sorry_. Let me take you in, keep you. You’ll never be alone again, I’ll never--”

How, even this gone, did Blake know exactly what to say to him? Avon kissed him hard and fast, almost to cut him off, almost in apology. But Blake’s torrent of careless words had assumed a shape now (helped by the fact that Avon had let up for a moment, stopped wracking him with sex), and Blake was determined to get it out.

“I’ve been broken before. But I always knew you could break me better--take me apart like a machine you wanted to understand, down to the wires, and put me back together again. Leave me whole, more myself, stronger. Nobody else _could_ do that, nobody else would do that _for me._ And you _did_ protect me. _Thank you_ for protecting me. I saw that. You. You always--”

“You did the same,” Avon said, swallowing. “You always made a home for me.” And Blake looked as glad to hear it as Avon was satisfied by being told he’d proved himself as Blake’s Alpha. Such a lot of bitterness drained out of Avon, and he pressed a kiss to Blake’s forehead.

“Once more,” he murmured into Blake’s hair. “Just to take the edge off. To be sure you’re ready.” And he slid down and laid his head against Blake’s chest and concentrated on rolling his fingers over Blake’s prostate until another climax wracked him.

“Pillows,” Avon said, with just enough command to help Blake along. Blake shoved two under his hips, and Avon knelt between his legs, pushing them wide.

Blake shivered, and his eyes were glazed. He rubbed his cunt against the length of Avon’s cock mindlessly, and Avon shuddered.

“Ah ah _ah_ ,” he whispered, holding Blake still, denying him, tracing Blake’s cunt with his fingers lightly. “You know Blake, when I spent ruts in your cabin, fucking your bedclothes shamelessly, I found something I suspected you’d have. Hoped, really. One of those ‘medical aid’ Alpha phalluses, the sort they dispense during puberty with your upgraded suppressants, to help you weather a heat alone. It was, of course, perfectly clean, but you can never quite shake the lingering heat pheromones off a thing like that. Even as no amount of your awful filtration could have made a room you slept and had heats in for two years not smell like you. I would save that toy for the height of the rut, and then I’d finally let myself lick and bite and suck something that had been in you--that still tasted like you.” He smiled almost lazily at Blake. “I never came so hard in my _life_.”

Blake’s eyes were wide and glassy. He was clearly taking this in, even if he seemed past responding.

“I knew it wasn’t terribly ethical,” Avon continued, expression mock-contrite. “I violated your privacy, of course. But I _really_ couldn’t help it, could I?”

Avon took himself in hand, parting Blake’s cunt with the fingers of his other hand. “The trouble with those medical aids,” he continued conversationally, “is that they always run a little _small_.” He slammed himself in up to the knot, and Blake shouted, throwing his head back. Avon smiled sweetly. “Don’t you find?”

He fucked Blake a little, a wonderfully easy slide, just up to the knot. Blake groaned appreciatively, properly getting what he wanted now—it would be easy just to give into it, and fuck him until they were both screaming. But Avon could feel Blake’s heat pheromones drawing down his own rut, the pressure of it spooling down low into his belly, and he wanted to finish the bond while he was still coherent.

“Blake,” Avon murmured, earnest now, not using a trace of command. He lowered himself down over Blake, so that his neck was close to Blake’s mouth. He let Blake breathe him in and lick the pheromones off him.

“That’s right,” Avon said, encouraging, gasping a little at the feel of Blake tonguing him from the source. “Yours.” He brushed his cheek across Blake’s. “Do you want it? Bite, Bla--”

He cut himself off in a sharp gasp and shut his eyes as he felt Blake’s teeth sink into him with conviction.

“ _Yes_ ,” he breathed, a storm of endorphins making the pain feel exceptionally good. Blake’s jaw worked deep, and without planning it Avon shoved all the way home in Blake’s cunt, making Blake cry out against his neck as the knot entered him. Avon would have pushed deeper, if he physically could. He brought up a hand to clench around the bite on Blake’s neck, frantically squeezing it. “That’s--so good,” Avon said, dizzy with it, pulling back only reluctantly, kissing his blood off Blake’s proud, smiling mouth.

Avon realized he’d been deluding himself when he’d fantasized about being able to take this slowly the first time. His rut fell on him like the sky opening in a downpour, and he had nothing like control. He couldn’t blame it all on the bite, or on the earlier battle rush--he knew he’d been sliding since he’d seen Blake again, and drowning since he’d touched him. And really Avon liked that in the full flush of rut he knew nothing like shame. He was perfectly confident in what he wanted. It must, he’d thought wryly in the past, be a little like being Blake.

Rut thundered through him, and he felt it as a surge of wild, electric strength. He laughed, dragging Blake into a kiss.

“I’m going to fuck you until you forget your own name,” he promised. “But you’re going to remember mine.”

He thrust hard, the not-yet-fully-swollen knot popping in and out of Blake to the accompaniment of some loud, gloriously appreciative cries. Blake made it easy for him, letting Avon wreck him, pushing himself greedily into the thrusts. Avon knew he was high because he was keening and babbling treacly nonsense, but everything felt fantastic, and Blake was here with him, and obviously loving it.

The base was essentially a cement bunker, so, thankfully, fairly sound proof. Though hopefully at least _some_ of the screaming was getting through. Avon found he didn’t mind people knowing he was fucking Blake through the bed at all, actually, didn’t mind if everyone knew he could make Blake scream for him, scream _his name_ \--mm, and he was doing it, at pleasingly regular intervals. Av’n, like when he was busy on a normal day or too fucked-out to remember vowels. Making a pet-name of the word.

“You’re taking it so well,” Avon cooed, “I’m so proud of you.” Because it was true. Blake was a responsive, eager, generous delight to fuck, was making it so good for him. He gave himself so fully, so bravely, with such determination. And while every besotted O-mated Alpha thought they had the best Omega, all but Avon were sadly mistaken, because Blake was so obviously the most brilliant and interesting Omega in the running (the way he wanted the whole _universe_ safe and cared for made every other Omega look limited and epicene and unappealing), no, the best person full-stop. Avon was incredibly, ludicrously lucky to have gotten him. He loved Blake past reason, he adored him more than life. He hoped Blake knew how much, how wonderful he was. In a slurred voice Avon assured Blake of this, while keeping up a frantic rhythm, scrabbling at the bed and Blake’s arms for purchase, kissing him desperately, sucking and biting, leaving marks.

With a final thrust he shoved himself home in Blake and felt his knot flare, locking them together. Blake bucked off the bed, throwing back his head and arching his neck in the prettiest display of submission Avon had ever seen, and Avon came helplessly, extravagantly, his knot swelling hard, right up against Blake’s prostate (mm, Blake seemed to enjoy _that_ ). Alphas took a while to achieve orgasm, but once they did their knots swelled still further to keep the semen in, and they experienced coursing lashes of pleasure until they could finally detach from their partners. Too gone to remember that he’d given Blake birth control himself and that they’d decided anything of the kind was an awful idea at present, Avon experienced a tender satisfaction with how full Blake was of him, at how tightly-sealed Blake’s cunt was around him. He felt panicked at the idea of any dripping out--but no, Blake’s hips were elevated. They were safe, it was fine. Not a drop would be lost. (Still, he kept darting glances just to check, to reassure himself.)

His come would work deeper in if Blake came again, he thought absently. With that thought in mind, he drank in Blake’s low moans (still pinned, still slack-limbed and loose from the fucking and the prostate orgasm, writhing weakly in a way that made them both shiver) as he brought Blake off with his hands, one working Blake’s trembling, over-stimulated clit and the other pumping Blake’s neglected, heavy cock.

It seemed a shame that Blake’s come should go to waste, and so he licked it off his hand, with some foggy notion of keeping it safe in him. Of wanting to give Blake everything.

When Avon came down a little, Blake’s hand was on his face, brushing his hair away from his perspiration-slicked forehead. They were still locked together, and could expect to be for some minutes more.

“Are you back with me?” Blake asked.

Avon nodded. “At the moment.” It would fade in and out, he knew. Though he probably wouldn’t be quite _that_ out of himself again. “How do you feel? Did I—?”

“You didn’t hurt me,” Blake said. “Ridiculously satisfied.” He gave Avon a knowing, affectionate smile. “Happy, as promised.”

Ah. So he had caught that. Avon often wished that heats and ruts were accompanied by low-level amnesia, but unfortunately it was often easier to understand what had been done and said after than during.

“And you?” Blake asked.

“Ludicrously so,” Avon said, meaning it honestly. “‘Seductive technobabble’?” he asked after a moment.

Blake chuckled. “We were looking at the teleport systems when your pheromones first started to come through. I thought ‘this console has a lot of buttons that probably do something dangerous, but I still want him to fuck me ragged over it’. Though I thought your competence was grotesquely attractive on the _London_ , so I’m probably not being entirely fair to your extra-chemical charms.” The memory called forth another, and Blake rolled his eyes. “Then I embarrassed myself by essentially rubbing against your cheek while trying to explain why we needed to go to Cygnus Alpha--I had no idea how to handle your pheromones, then. I must have looked an idiot.”

“I was too distracted by similar thoughts to notice.” Avon smiled. “And by how little I liked the proposed plan.”

“Would you rather not have had a crew, then?” Blake raised an eyebrow.

“Just because you were right doesn’t mean my objections weren’t also valid,” Avon corrected him.

“You started being sharper with me, after that,” Blake said, a little wistfully. “We were friendlier, before you knew what I was. I thought you must have resented an unwanted attraction being forced upon you, in spite of your desire for self-sufficiency and dislike of me.”

“I was trying _not_ to make it any _more_ obvious that I was in equal parts besotted with you and desperate to fuck you, when you seemed to have about as much use for an Alpha as you did for the Federation Good Conduct Guide.”

“So you never just disagreed with me for rational reasons?” Blake teased. “I’ll bear that in mind when I evaluate your advice in future.”

“Rational reasons, and the fact that you can be immensely frustrating,” Avon conceded. “Who could forget your insufferably self-sacrificing ‘I’ll go myself, you don’t have to’s, and those remarks about children, telling everyone, in _my hearing_ , all about how you wanted to let someone else breed you.”

Blake rolled his eyes. “It was never ‘someone else’, Avon. Actually that’s part of why I thought you weren’t truly interested in me, or in anything like your right mind when you suggested it. You were always scathing about the idea.”

“No.” Avon looked to the side. “I liked it--too much. I thought you knew. _Ah_ \--” They slid apart, gently, and Avon fell to the side of Blake.

They were going to need it again, soon. Inside an hour. Avon could feel it, could smell it on Blake. The cycles came on fast, at the start of a forced estrous like this.

“Mm,” Avon said meditatively. “Earlier, when you were on your knees— How do you feel about sucking me off?”

“I suppose taking the knot in my mouth would be possible, on a second orgasm,” Blake said reasonably, considering logistics. “Those are less prolonged than the first, and I can certainly breathe through my nose.”

Avon, next to him, blinked. “I--hadn’t even thought about that.”

His _knot_ in Blake’s mouth? Pouring himself down Blake’s throat like _that?_ That was so extreme, dangerous, even, the knot swelled so large-- far worse than a standard ball gag. The Federation’s deep cultural ambivalence about Alpha sexuality meant that the relatively decorous upper-class erotica shops Avon had used to visit on irregular occasions and the other new-system Alphas (of various sex classes) he’d slept with had never suggested anything this decadent to Avon. (And nothing was more class-coded on Earth than the sort of sex shop one visited.)

“Really?” Blake asked mildly, seeming a little surprised. “I’ve thought about it a lot. The aesthetics suffer somewhat--eyes watering and the rest. Still, I’d be _very_ happy to cry for you, if you’d enjoy it.”

Blake, man of the people, had gotten around rather more, and it had given his ideas scope. If, for five seconds in his life, Avon had imagined that sex with Blake might be staid, wholesome, morally correct and dull, he wanted to erase those seconds from history. He was very willing to let Blake expand his mind, among other things.

Over the rest of the heat and rut, they did manage the achingly slow and tender fuck Avon had always wanted. Not, admittedly, on the first day, but eventually. The rucksack Blake had brought for them turned out to contain, among other things, green apples, because Blake knew Avon liked them, and Avon (slightly high again) found himself stupidly pleased and turned on by Blake’s having remembered his preference. Blake laughed and said it wasn’t anything (but didn’t complain about the appreciative, eagerly offered reward).

It was good in ways neither of them had quite expected. They’d both had un-bonded partners before, some of whom had stayed with them during ruts, but neither of them had ever had a rut or heat that could have been described as _fun_ before. Avon not only caught on when Blake suggested idly, ’What if we’d both been right about one another?’, he also played along, offering himself gleefully for a round, enjoying the strange frisson of pretending Blake was his Alpha.

Once, Blake fell asleep with Avon spread over his back, still locked in him. Blake was larger, sturdy. Seemed made to bear him. Avon thought the possession of it, the way Blake cradled him and the way he protected Blake’s body with his own were for him possibly the highlights of the heat’s gamut of encounters.

***

Avon at breakfast, the first day they were back in commission, was a cheerful nightmare. He sat down at the table with his crewmates wearing a grin that had no business existing on anyone’s face before three pm, earliest. He looked years younger, he was more conservatively-dressed than anyone present but Vila had ever seen him, and his breakfast tray was impressively loaded. Avon typically didn’t ingest anything before noon but coffee. Avon had, for the past year, seemed to be largely avoiding food in favor of nutrient tabs. Avon’s tray presently contained juice, tea, toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, a grilled tomato and a black pudding (synth pork was apparently a GP specialty).

“Good morning,” Avon purred.

“Oh god,” Tarrant said. “This is literally insufferable.”

Dayna and Soolin looked at Avon like he’d been taken over by an alien lifeform. Vila had his ‘It’s Blake, isn’t it?’ expression on, last seen a few days ago.

Avon ignored Tarrant totally. “How have you been getting on, then?” He speared a bit of scrambled egg and consumed it with relish.

Dayna, still wary, said it was all going fine. Well, even. They’d all recently been cleared by medical, after having been urged to take some time to recover from the crash and attendant stress. Blake’s people had set up that meeting Blake had asked for, this afternoon--the general briefing.

“Good,” Avon said, peaceably, after he finished chewing a bite of mushroom. “That should be interesting. I’d like to know how they’re disguising the scale of this operation from Orac, for a start.”

“You know,” Vila said thoughtfully, “if you’d said to me, back home on the Liberator, ‘Vila old son, I’m never going to be happy until I’ve fucked Blake stupid, after which I’ll be a comparative pleasure to work with’, I’d have _really_ forwarded the cause. Ah--he here then?”

Avon’s head had jerked up automatically in response to some unseen stimulus, and he turned back and narrowed his eyes at Vila for noticing.

A minute later, Blake sat down with them. His breakfast plate was similarly laden, but Tarrant had the idea that Blake was a Man Who Had Breakfast, and that this was not quite so fantastic a departure.

“We do good morning cocoa here,” he said to Avon, hanging him a mug--he’d gotten one for himself and another for Avon.

Avon said, “Thank you” quite curtly, trying and failing not to look ridiculously infatuated. Then he noticed Blake’s plate. “You can’t have three fried eggs. Your heart will explode. Give one to Dayna, she needs the calories.”

Rolling his eyes, Blake sighed and offered Dayna an egg, speared on his fork, with a flourish. She took it solemnly.

Blake proceeded to Get To Know Dayna and Soolin particularly, apparently operating under the assumption that he and Tarrant had already been introduced. It should have been forced, but Blake was as good at chatting warmly with people as Avon was rubbish at it.

Then Blake left for a meeting, offering to show Dayna and Soolin the weapons range they hadn’t yet found en route.

“See you at the briefing,” he said to Avon as he went, their wrists brushing for a moment as they touched hands.

“Mm,” Avon said, with a slightly dazed smile, and turned back to his cocoa.

“You are the most whipped thing in existence,” Tarrant hissed when Blake was well and truly out of earshot.

“Ah,” Avon said a bit dreamily, “but what a whip.”

“He’s not all that,” Tarrant scoffed. For an Omega, Blake was certainly no pornovid starlet. Granted, neither was Avon, but Tarrant really didn’t see the desperate appeal.

“Really?” Avon laughed, seeming not at all offended. “Give it a week, Tarrant.”

“You’re an embarrassment to Alpha dignity,” Tarrant said severely, and Vila snorted into his tea at the idea of Alpha Dignity.

Avon’s head jerked again, as though pulled by a string.

“I’ve just remembered,” Blake said, arriving back at the table, “they plan to discuss the trade agreement this morning as well. I’ll want you for that.” He grabbed his abandoned mug, drained it, and walked away.

“Avon?” he called without turning around.

“Coming,” Avon said, draining his own mug and walking after him.

And sure enough, within a week Tarrant had realized that Blake had more natural leadership ability than anyone he’d ever served with; that Blake reminded him obscurely of his older brother; that he wanted to be Blake or follow him or something; that Blake was funny, and clever as hell; that if anyone made him think they could win this war, it was him.

When Avon crossed Tarrant and Blake’s path in the hall, the two of them were en route to take out an experimental flier. Blake was talking to Tarrant and walking with him, having thrown a paternal but somehow not insulting arm around his shoulders.

“Still ‘not all that’?” Avon called in a casual voice, walking away even as he said it. Avon didn’t seem to be even slightly jealous (which was a little insulting, because Tarrant was another Alpha--he might have been a threat!), just smug. Tarrant blushed a little, embarrassed by the strength of his own homosocial crush.

“Shut up, Avon,” he called back. Avon just laughed as he disappeared around a corner.

Blake raised an eyebrow, as if to ask Tarrant what that was all about.

“Sorry,” Tarrant said, not feeling particularly apologetic. “Your Alpha is the biggest dick I’ve ever met.”

“Mm, me too,” Blake said without missing a beat.

“ _Eugh_ ,” Tarrant said succinctly.

***

Avon’s re-integration into Blake’s command structure went fairly easily. Blake’s contacts got used to the way Blake’s somewhat high-strung Alpha lurked behind him in meetings or sat in a chair next to him, weighing in on logistical and technical issues, watching them intently in case they tried anything. It still rankled at Avon that he and Blake were deeply inveigled in a risky enterprise. It wasn’t what he’d wanted for them. But what he’d wanted for them had turned out to be impossible, just at present, and his instincts to blindly attack anything that threatened them and to survive by avoiding danger were both as useful as they were limited and flawed. Yet now, discreetly or casually, Blake could slide his wrist across Avon’s, and Avon’s surging panic abated, slightly--enough that he could focus and get on with evaluating whatever decisions they needed to make relatively rationally.

They had one epic row (one epic, _public_ row, anyway) over the tension between their organizational roles and the demands thereof, their relationship and their genetic programming. Blake had agreed to personally oversee the destruction of a Pylene 50 manufacturing center, on the ground, and when this was presented to Avon in a group strategy session as a fait accompli, Avon simply said ‘no’. It wasn’t in a laden command tone, but then, it didn’t have to be. Blake and Avon fought often, and didn’t scruple to do it in company, but this wasn’t the same. It was an absolute, private negative, brought out into daylight, and it was uncomfortably evident that this was Blake’s Alpha and partner telling him no rather than his very forward second telling him he was being a fool.

“Oh, _Avon_ ,” Blake said in a distinctly dangerous voice. “Are we really going to do this?”

Avon smiled grimly, and silently cracked his knuckles.

Blake suggested everyone go--they’d reconvene in the morning. Ordered out, those assembled had made it most of the way down the corridor before they'd started to hear indecipherable but unmistakable sounds of one hell of an argument.

The next morning, it wasn’t clear who’d won. Smart money was on Blake, and indeed he was still going (as was Avon, now), but the whole shape of the raid had changed in the others’ absence. Whether this was a compromise formation or the result of someone’s outright victory was unclear, and uncharacteristically, neither man said much about it. What little of their bites showed around their collars looked distinct and sharp, as though they’d fought that viciously, or remade them.

***

Soolin had started out as a mercenary, and she stayed with the rebellion for reasons she’d never chosen to articulate to her comrades. She merely raised an eyebrow when, on a particularly bad day, Avon (frustrated and more pessimistic even than usual) asked her why in hell she stuck around.

“Why do you?” she asked mildly, ironically.

She wasn’t sexually interested in anyone Blake had accrued to himself, but they were her people as much as they were Avon’s. He knew better than to try and embarrass her on that point, when the two of them understood one another. She’d failed her first family, and wouldn’t abandon another. Tarrant, Dayna, Soolin and Avon were all Alphas--they were all at their best with something worthwhile to protect. (And the universe wasn’t so replete with good things that she could afford to leave these people and their work behind.) They all needed to do it, as much as whatever it was they’d chosen needed protection. Maybe more. It was rich of Avon to ask _her_ why she needed to be _for_ something or someone.

Avon smiled sardonically, the toxicity of his mood and his surfeit of undirected aggression-hormones draining off.

“I’m being blackmailed, of course. Blake is only going to let me get him pregnant when free men can think and speak, etcetera.”

“Maybe I’m waiting to be a godmother,” Soolin suggested, and Avon laughed.


	3. Deleted Scene/Extras

**bunker conversation**

 

“Stop that, we’re stuck in this bunker until they cut through. You know one thing will lead to another, and I’m not going through this in front of _Vila and Deva_.”

“We’re here too,” Dayna reminded him.

“And we can hear you,” Soolin deadpanned. “In case you’ve forgotten. Or care.”

“And friends,” Blake conceded.

“That clearing squad had better work fast,” Avon seethed.

“Or their new executive officer will come into the role with a considerable grudge against them?” Blake raised an eyebrow, amused.

“Stop _that_ \--don’t do anything attractive for the next hour, at least.”

“I’m demonstrably _not._ ”

“Start by avoiding any homonyms for ‘knot’, etcetera.” Avon grasped for the least sexual thing he could think of and landed on ‘his own failures over the past two years’. Better do an inventory, while they were here. “I’ve retained Orac, incidentally. There’s a Stardrive we can salvage--it’s faster than anything I’ve ever encountered. I’ve managed to cobble together some adaptable teleportation technology, and we’ve an antidote for Pylene-50, if you’ve heard of it.”

“Of _course_ I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s the manufacture and distribution, that have proved a challenge. I’m not used to working on this scale. Oh, and my crew--Vila remains as useful as ever, when sober. Tarrant’s a first-class pilot, Soolin is possibly the best shot in the galaxy, and Dayna is a capable fighter and a skilled weapons designer. It is of course a matter for your discretion, but I think they should be integrated into what passes for your ranks as officers, if they are willing and you have such a category. As to your point about a connection between us being a liability, I’ve given it rather a lot of thought. But we managed, over the course of the past two years, to live separately, despite a degree of compatibility and an incubation period that together essentially amounted to a pseudobond. Not particularly well, on my part at least, but we did do it. And what about pheromonal injections?”

“They used to employ them for deep space flights, didn’t they? Now that is an idea. We could lay in a stockpile for emergencies. It wouldn’t even need to be injections, an inhaler might do the job--like asthmatics used to use. When you said you had _nothing_ , Avon, did you mean you had--rather a _lot_ , actually?”

Avon frowned. “I suppose that is one, ludicrously optimistic way of looking at it. But from a less sanguine perspective, I lost a base due to compromised security. Everything that could possibly have gone wrong with the think-tank I tried to build did so, and then more went wrong besides. The interplanetary alliance we need to handle the Pylene antidote needs soldered together by a steadier hand than mine. It’ll have to be yours, I’m afraid. I suspect you can make something of my groundwork.”

“Avon. Has anyone ever told you you’re a ridiculous perfectionist?”

“You have, on occasion, but it’s demonstrably nonsense. If I were, I’d have done better. Well?”

“A few bases,” Blake said, understanding it was his turn. “A few hundred good people, some of them particularly gifted. They’ll brief you on our projects--we need a proper meeting, for your people and mine. Security’s been a nightmare. Thus the--”

Avon rolled his eyes. “We’ll talk about your new screening system and how you personally will have nothing to do with it when I’ve had a chance to ask Deva what he thinks. He seems to be the source of sense in your organization.”

“At least since--Avon. I’ve lost Jenna.” Blake admitted.

“Cally,” Avon said for his part. Blake winced, but not like it was entirely new information. He’d known, or had reason to suspect. “And the Liberator,” which Blake probably also knew or suspected, if he’d heard enough rumors to know Cally wasn’t with them any longer. “Servalan, who is still alive, if _that_ delightful news hasn’t reached you--”

Blake groaned. It hadn’t.

“--engineered _that_ particular debacle. I suspect she believes we’re bonded, given that she used you as bait. Apparently I am easier to find and manipulate than you are--she’s been giving me more than my share of her personal attention. I suspect I’m supposed to find it flattering, rather than taking it as obvious evidence that she believes I’m the weak link.”

“I’m sorry.”

Avon smiled unpleasantly. “As you once told me, it isn’t you who should be sorry.”

“It isn’t you either,” Blake said, controlled anger in his tone, and Avon disagreed, but loved Blake a hair more for thinking it.

Someone at the door rapped a call-sign, and Deva tapped out the response.

“That’s our lot,” Blake said.

“Guns at the ready, nonetheless,” Avon advised, and Blake nodded. The Federation might well have captured someone on their side. Soolin at least didn’t need told--she’d already been hefting hers. The inhabitants of the bunker took up defensive postures with good sight-lines and cover--Blake near Vila, who he wryly apologized for not having properly said hello to yet.

“You seemed busy,” Vila said, amused rather than offended.

But it was just Blake’s people, and Tarrant, Arlen and Klyn were conveyed to the medical unit.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Campaign Notes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5582194) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los)
  * [A/B/Overdrive (The Happy Wreck Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7029637) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los)




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